Waitlist for group classes: how it works

A class capped at twelve is full, two people cancel an hour before the start — and two spots sit empty even though there were people who wanted them: they were turned away a week ago. A waitlist closes that gap: the client joins a queue for a full class, and when a spot frees up the first person in line gets a notification and the spot is held for them until the deadline. Here's how it works for the client and for the studio, which settings to choose, and why the queue doesn't distort your attendance figures.

What a waitlist is and when you need one

A waitlist is a queue for a class that has no spots left. Instead of hearing "we're full, try another day", the client joins the list and gets a spot if someone drops out. For the studio it's a way of pushing popular slots to full: cancellations happen in every group, and without a queue a freed-up spot only goes to whoever happened to open the schedule at the right minute.

You need one wherever there's a group format with a cap on spots: yoga and pilates, gym classes and dance, children's clubs, courses and masterclasses, group sessions in clinics and salons. The more popular the time — weekday evenings, Saturday mornings — the more often the group is full and the more bookings are lost without a queue. One-to-one bookings with a specialist have a different problem, solved by reminders and visit confirmation — there's a separate article on no-shows for that.

How it works for the client

The client sees the waitlist in the app — SetNow Client or your company's branded app. The app is needed because the spot offer arrives as a push notification and there isn't much time to answer. The path goes like this:

• On a full class, "Book" is replaced by "Join the waitlist". If there are spots left, there's no button — the right action there is simply to book.
• After that the client sees their position: "You're #3 on the waitlist". All their queues are gathered on the "My classes" tab, and they can leave a queue at any moment.
• Someone cancels — the first person in line gets a "A spot opened up" push and, if the studio has switched on SMS duplication, a text too. A banner with a timer appears in the app: the spot is held for them until the response window runs out.
• The client taps "Book" — and they're in the group. While the timer runs, nobody else can take that spot: not from the queue, not through ordinary booking.
• No answer or a decline — the offer expires and the spot goes to the next person. Whoever stayed silent drops out of the queue: they can come back, but at the end of it.

Why not send them to the back of the queue automatically? On a short queue of two people that turns into a carousel: the spot goes round and round to people who have stopped answering while someone who genuinely would come is left waiting. Dropping out is fairer — the queue moves towards people who are actually there.

What the front desk and the coach see

The queue is part of the class in the web dashboard and in the employee app. A "+3 in queue" badge appears on the class in the schedule and calendar — so you can see at a glance where demand exceeds capacity. Inside the class there's a list of everyone waiting, with their position, status and, if a spot has already been offered, the response deadline. There are five actions on each entry:

• Add to the waitlist — the client rang or came up to the desk; the front desk puts them in the queue, and from then on they get offers like everyone else.
• Move to the top — a regular, or someone you promised, can be given priority.
• Offer now — send an offer to a specific person out of turn, if there's a spot.
• Book — put them straight into the group, bypassing the queue: they're already standing in the room, say.
• Remove from the list — take an entry out; if a spot has already been offered to it, that spot goes to the next person.

The coach running the class gets a push when someone joins the queue for their group: "New on the waitlist". That's a separate toggle in personal notification settings — if the queue is distracting, it can be switched off without touching any other notifications.

How to configure it: three settings

The waitlist is off by default — the owner or an administrator switches it on in booking settings. The same place holds the three settings that decide how the queue behaves in real life:

• Response window — how many minutes the client has to accept an offered spot. The default is 30, the range 5 to 180. A shorter window moves the queue faster, a longer one gives people more chance of seeing the push. For evening groups 30-45 minutes is sensible; for morning ones, where people are invited the night before, an hour or more.
• Stop N minutes before the start — how long before the start the list stops working. The default is 120 minutes. The logic is simple: an offer nobody could physically travel to in time is worse than silence. Past that line the queue freezes, outstanding offers go dark, and the freed-up spot becomes available to everyone — it shows up in ordinary booking.
• Duplicate by SMS — send the spot offer as a text as well. Switch it on if some of your clients don't have the app or have push switched off: an offer lives for tens of minutes and there's no second chance. Texts come out of the company's SMS bundle.

The starting values — 30 minutes to respond, stop two hours before — suit most studios. Change them on the evidence: if offers regularly expire, lengthen the window; if the queue stays silent on cancellations an hour or two before class and you'd rather it kicked in, shorten the stop.

Why the queue isn't a booking and doesn't spoil your numbers

Somebody on the waitlist isn't a participant. They don't count towards the group, attendance, revenue or the coach's payroll, and "4 of 5 booked" on the class counts only real bookings. The one thing an offered spot affects is availability: while the response window runs, it's taken as far as everyone else is concerned.

The same rule applies on the outside. On your public booking page and in the schedule widget on your website, free spots are counted with held offers taken into account — a client without the app won't see "a spot's available" where one is already being held for somebody in the queue. You can't join a queue without the app: there's nowhere to deliver an offer to an anonymous visitor.

Frequent questions

• Two spots free up at once — what happens? Offers go to the first two in the queue simultaneously, each with their own response window.
• The class is cancelled — what happens to the queue? It closes and nobody is offered anything: there's no sense inviting people to a class that isn't happening. The same applies if the class is deleted, and after it has started.
• The class time has moved? Outstanding offers are withdrawn — the person agreed to a specific time. Their positions stay in the queue and they'll be offered a spot again.
• Can you join the queue while there are still spots? No: the right action is to book. A queue of one with spots available would only confuse both sides.
• The front desk wants to reduce a group's capacity but there are already more bookings than that? The system won't allow it: capacity can't be dropped below the spots taken, including outstanding offers.
• Someone from the queue turns up in person before they've been offered a spot? The front desk taps "Book" on the class — the client joins the group and their queue entry is closed.

Where to start

Switch the waitlist on in booking settings and leave the defaults alone. Tell your clients that a full class can now be joined as a queue right in the app, and tell your coaches they'll be getting notifications about new people in the queue. In a couple of weeks look at the queue badges in the schedule: a consistently long queue for the same time isn't a problem, it's demand — and a reason to open another group.

In SetNow the waitlist works on group classes: the client joins the queue in the app, the first in line gets a push and — if the studio wants it — an SMS, the spot is held for them until the deadline, and the front desk and the coach see the queue on the class in the web dashboard and in the employee app. It's switched on in the company's booking settings and off by default, so nothing changes for anyone who doesn't need a queue.